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Debilitatingly slow performance / Mediasonic Probox + Seagate IronWolf

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(@ripariankit)
Posts: 8
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I purchased a Mediasonic ProBox HF2-SU3S2 4 Bay USB 3.0 enclosure, 4 Seagate IronWolf 6TB drives, and SoftRaid in July of 2019. I edited on it just fine until about a year ago, when speeds started to drop. At first I thought it was my iMac performance and replaced that, only to discover that the problems persisted. Now I've discovered it's definitely my RAID. Halp!

Screen Shot 2021 08 26 at 3.20.04 PM
 
Posted : 26/08/2021 5:29 pm
(@softraid-support)
Posts: 8005
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Look in SoftRAID disk tiles and see if you are connected at USB3 or USB2. If you are connected at USB3, then you may need to do a backup/restore, this could be the volume directory is damaged.

 
Posted : 26/08/2021 7:19 pm
(@ripariankit)
Posts: 8
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Topic starter
 

Drives are indeed showing a USB3 bus connection. What is your recommended procedure for backup/restore?

 
Posted : 30/08/2021 1:27 pm
(@softraid-support)
Posts: 8005
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@ripariankit

An app like Carbon Copy Cloner or SuperDuper are great, but you can use Finder copy. CCC has a great trial period, all features available.

 
Posted : 30/08/2021 6:28 pm
(@ripariankit)
Posts: 8
Active Member
Topic starter
 

I have backed up all my media and erased my RAID using SoftRAID. Performance remains unchanged. What are my next steps?

 
Posted : 22/09/2021 5:01 pm
(@softraid-support)
Posts: 8005
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Is this volume RAID 0? If not, can you make it RAID 0?

THen test it with SoftRAID.

Then use "Convert" to make it Apple RAID.

test again.

 

Same numbers or different?

(you can convert again any time)

 

 
Posted : 22/09/2021 5:05 pm
(@ripariankit)
Posts: 8
Active Member
Topic starter
 

As a Raid 0 and swapped it to being an Apple RAID, it looks to be performing a little better but not much. I've attached a screenshot. Am I missing something here? Shouldn't this hardware perform better than this? I have another RAID that's for archiving that's running the less expensive Barracude Compute drives and is performing at nearly twice the read and 100MB/s faster write speeds of the IronWolf drive RAID.

Thanks again for the help. I'm at a loss.

DiskSpeedTest raid0 APPLE

 

 
Posted : 28/09/2021 11:31 am
(@softraid-support)
Posts: 8005
Member Admin
 

@ripariankit

 

Worst case you should be getting 350Mb/s over USB 3 buses.

Try AJA System test for a more consistent result. Use 16GB file size, 5K video and RGBA codec.

I assume if you switch between SoftRAID/Apple RAID (using SoftRAID convert), there is little difference. That would point you to a hardware issue.

Make sure you are not using a USB hub and have tried different cabling.

 
Posted : 28/09/2021 2:31 pm
(@ripariankit)
Posts: 8
Active Member
Topic starter
 

Very interestingly the results from AJA System Test were quite a bit different than Blackmagic Disk Speed Test. RAID 0 did pretty well, so I tried a RAID 5, which did drop in speed but which was fairly consistent across read/write. I'm wondering now if perhaps I should give editing a try on this drive again to see if I am still experiencing frame drops and poor performance.

AJA   RAID 0
AJA   RAID 5 5k
AJA   RAID 5 UHD

 

 
Posted : 28/09/2021 4:57 pm
(@softraid-support)
Posts: 8005
Member Admin
 

Give it a try. RAID 5 is much slower over USB, because USB requires the CPU to perform all the bus transactions.

 
Posted : 29/09/2021 12:09 am
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